Businesses and corporations across the world are all embracing new forms of lead generation and sales tactics with social media savvy. Business professionals understand the concept and need for social media but struggle to determine the ROI or generate leads via the networks. While social media should never be deemed as a sole source of leads or driver of business development, it can help in the cause. The following tactics will help your business determine how to generate leads via referral traffic.
A Multi- Network Effort
There are some social media channels better poised to offer referral traffic benefits than others, some of the big players include:
LinkedIn: For business to business organizations, LinkedIn is by far the best network to generate leads. No matter what the nature of your business is if you sell to other businesses or corporations, having an optimized LinkedIn page, personal presence, and frequent updates will help to drive that traffic
How?: The types of content that are most often shared on LinkedIn are industry articles. If your company is blogging and sharing that blog on your LinkedIn, those links direct back to your onsite blog where someone is more likely to convert. LinkedIn is also a hub for job seekers, if you are posting open positions you are sure to receive referral traffic from those looking to learn more about your company.
Twitter: Twitter updates are a sort of tease, you can’t pack everything you want to say in 140 characters which makes linking to external content a best practice. Using shortened links that bring interested users to your product pages, blogs, and microsites will boost the referral traffic to your site.
Pinterest: While most large companies write off Pinterest as a serious channel for professional networking, there are plenty of large companies who do it well. What makes Pinterest different is it capitalizes on users’ gravitation toward images. In fact, images make up 93% of the most engaging posts on Facebook. Each image on Pinterest is divided by categories and links back to the source. If you have a blog on Top 10 ways to nail your next interview, share it on Pinterest and include an interesting image that will direct users back to your website. What is great about Pinterest is users do not have to follow or even know your brand to come across your pin, so you can start to grow your audience in the Female professionals between 25-54 demographic.
StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon is another under rated tool in the social network arsenal. Similar to Pinterest, StumbleUpon brings people to your website that have found you while speed browsing the Internet. A user determines their interests and simply clicks “stumble”, and each stumble brings them to a new webpage that might interest them. What is different about StumbleUpon is there is not a corporate profile; you have to use it to get the benefits. Once you get the hang of it you can suggest certain pages of your website that would interest a user. The pages that are going to get the most mileage are videos, blogs, and interactive pages.
Not Forgotten
Now you are probably asking yourself, where is Facebook? You can’t deny that when talking about social media, Facebook inevitably comes up, however Facebook is not one of the leaders in referral traffic.
Facebook: Yes, you can receive referral traffic by posting your blog or product pages, however Facebook is more about branding over anything else. Your company Facebook page is your homepage when it comes to social media, which is important but doesn’t always turn into ROI. What can be done to broaden your audience and ignite curiosity on Facebook is to invest in advertising.
Google+: Google+ is incredibly important not only as a social network, but for SEO reasons. Google wants us to play with their toys and that includes, Gmail, hangouts, YouTube, and Maps. Google+ should definitely be a strategy to consider and implement however, it is not one of the big players when it comes to referral traffic.
That is the key with all social media, don’t sign up with all networks just to have them, it is a strategic approach focusing on one network at a time and doing the well before moving on.
